Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent unused condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The 118-year struggle between Rome and Carthage (264-146 BC) focusing on the seventeen-year Second Punic War in which the Carthaginian leader was Hannibal was the defining event in Roman history since the foundation of the city over 500 years before. For most of those years Roman expansion had been grad- ual and local a matter of consolidating the city’s position and influence at the expense of such peoples as the Etruscans Oscans Sabines and Samnites fighting guerrilla wars in the hills razing recalcitrant towns and cities and only occasionally risking massed battle on flat land (something for which the Roman armies of the time were not trained). The struggle with Carthage changed all that showing the Romans for the first time the need for and rewards of colonial possessions and spheres of influence far from home. In a single century they changed not merely their attitudes but their whole military and political method; and from 146 BC onwards (the date of the obliteration of the city of Carthage) they had evolved from a prickly but essentially small-scale nation of farmers to a military juggernaut which was to overwhelm and dominate Europe North Africa and the Middle East for the next eight centuries. At least twice after the battles of Trasimene and Cannae (the greatest defeats ever inflicted on Rome until that time) and after the siege of Capua some half-dozen years later Hannibal could have marched on Rome and sacked it so chang- ing the entire course of European history. His failure to do so- his cavalry commander Maharbal commented that he knew how to win victory but not how to use it is the hinge point on which depends much of what we in the West now know and are. (SP)